Hakuheisen “Complete” (but not) and shown at Granitecon…

I’ve been pushing to have the Hakuheisen ready in time for Granitecon – due to various circumstances that didn’t quite work out. First I had to give up on the idea of having a display base ready to go with the kit, then I had to put off completion of the leg wiring, then I had to delay the weathering phase of the project – then I had to finish up the basic paint chipping and wash as an all-nighter just prior to the show. But in the end I had a pretty good model to bring with me to the model show – I am always happier at these things when I’ve managed to get a project ready to bring…

One of the more substantial problems I encountered during the rush to finish the project was that my compressor kicked the bucket. I took it apart and saw nothing obvious I could fix… as far as I could tell the tank wasn’t leaking, just the compressor would run and the tank would never build up any pressure. If I ran the thing constantly I could get maybe 5-10 PSI out of it… I didn’t much like the prospect of rushing off to Sears for a last-minute replacement just for one model project… But, as it turns out, I had a back-up plan ready to go: I had an aircan. I have no idea when I bought this can of “Badger Propel” – my best guess would be that it was before I bought my compressor, eight years ago. I don’t know why I would have bought it afterward… Unless maybe it was one of those times I was worried my compressor was introducing something nasty into the mix and I wanted to try an aircan to see if it made a difference in how well my paint would adhere to the models… But at any rate, this can’s been sitting around in my space for years, along with the adaptor/valve mechanism to use it – so lucky me, I was able to use it to spray my AC parts for Granitecon. It’s actually better than I remember, using canned air: no need to wait for the compressor to charge up, no noise – just open the valve and start spraying. Also, I think when I last used canned air I was a lot more wasteful of it – I would spray at full blast and freeze up the can pretty quickly. This time around the can did get cold but not nearly so quickly…

An unfortunate complication was that when I decided not to do the display base or the full leg wiring for Granitecon, I also lost my viable plan to power the eye LEDs using cheap, long-lasting AA batteries. So two days from the con I needed to come up with a power source and a way to hook it up. I have space in the model’s belly which I opened up a bit so I could fit a control circuit inside – said control circuit isn’t ready yet, but the space is there… So I measured it and looked for batteries I could fit in there. Since the two red LEDs in the head are connected in series, though, I needed more than 3V… I wound up using three watch batteries, 1.5V each, taped together in series with the head wires attached with electrical tape. I didn’t use a resistor, figuring the current limit of the batteries would be sufficient to keep the LEDs from burning out…

Now, what really sucks about using watch or calculator batteries to light models is that you pay a bunch of money for these batteries (this was at retail, mind you) and their lifetime stinks. Each battery was $4, so I paid $12 to light the model. (Hearing aid batteries would have been cheaper – eight for $10 – but I didn’t know their voltage rating so I didn’t want to gamble without that info on hand…) I think I connected the batteries to the LEDs at about 6AM on Sunday. They seemed reasonably bright when first connected: I don’t know if they got significantly dimmer as the day went on or if they just seemed dimmer in the more brightly-lit convention hall, but by noon time or so one couldn’t readily tell the forehead camera was lit at all (that LED is shining through “opaque” silver plastic and a layer of clear paint, mind you…) and the light of the main camera could be seen well only at a few angles (though this is as much because of the arrangement of the LED as anything… frosting the back side of the lens probably would have helped there…) Compare this to what you’d pay for a set of AA’s – or even one of those huge value-packs of AA’s… Four AA’s would power a couple LEDs for months, even with a series resistor wasting roughly half the power as heat – and cost half as much…

Anyway, I didn’t win anything this time out, but for very good reasons. (I’ll post photos from the show later on…)

So what went wrong?

Did I mention that I couldn’t get the hairspray technique to work on any of the parts other than the white parts and the cannon? I got other parts wet but the hairspray layer never soaked it up and released the paint… I don’t know if the outer paint layer was too thick, if the hairspray had been sitting too long, if I didn’t use enough of it, or what…

I have mentioned before that the front plates on the Kotobukiya CR-LH80 legs (the legs that come with this kit, Nine Ball, and the “Last Raven” AC) have a nasty tendency to break… One of the two front plates for the legs I’m using on this project broke sometime earlier in the project (during the painting phase, I think) and I patched it up… Now the other one’s cracked as well. It should be noted that the only reason these parts are breaking is ’cause I sometimes take them off and put them back on – for wiring tests and so on… After dealing with all of this I’ve come to the conclusion that my initial wiring plan for the lower leg was a dumb idea. Servicing the wiring depends on being able to remove this delicate part – and if you can’t fit the part back on afterward (and get it to stay put) the result is a very obvious gap – like what everybody got to see at Granitecon… The only reason I did it like that was because I wanted to be able to pass a connector through to the lower leg, which would have been nice as it’d give me a secure, reliable connection… But since this has turned out to be such a pain, I’ve switched to a different plan: using a hole I drilled earlier in the course of the project, the wires will now go straight down from the knee joint into the lower leg.

Because I don’t want the gap to appear again, and I don’t want the leg parts to get damaged any further, I’ve now super-glued them to the blue part of the lower leg… Unfortunately, this introduced a new, more pronounced crack in the leg that had previously been repaired…

This was not totally unexpected… When repairing this part, really the only way to make it really conform correctly to the blue part of the lower leg is to repair it on the blue part of the lower leg… If you go fiddling with it elsewhere, repairs can cause the angle to change slightly. Thus, pressing it down now caused it to bend backward, re-opening the old crack. I’ve filled this with super glue and sanded it down – as a result I’ve basically lost the paint on this part and have to paint it again… Not that bad, really, it’s pretty easy to do spot-paint jobs like this…

So if, by some measure, the project was “finished” before, it surely isn’t now. That’s fine. There’s some things here that would clearly benefit from further work – and having to spot-paint the right leg won’t kill me. Here’s the current state…